Abstract : This article is about people who do not buy commercial equipment to work their lands, but who invent, create and adapt machines to their specific needs. We will tell three stories: about a machine to harvest legumes in between olive-trees, a tool for hammering fencing-poles into the ground, and a triangle for hitching tools onto tractors. The article will take us to various places: Paris and Renage in France, Pyrgos and Kalentzi in Greece, and Tallinn in Estonia.
Our stories show the work and difficulties that go into transporting ideas, machines, practices, and knowledge from one site to another. This is not a simple move, it is not just a matter of copy-pasting an idea, a practice or a technology from one place to another. Ideas, practices, and technologies are not immutable objects, but they are ‘quasi-objects’. In order to move ideas and technologies, they need to be transformed, disassembled and reassembled, translated, represented, adjusted. We show that it is only via a variety of interlinked actions - imagining, testing, photographing, drawing, theorizing, sharing, rebuilding - that objects can travel and multiply. For these technological devices to be open, ‘convivial’ and low-tech, they need to be opened up in several ways. Our stories are thus not only about the material practices of open sourcing agricultural tools, but also about the (geo)politics, ethics, aesthetics and collective dimensions thereof.